the unwinding

[groundrules]

Heya! Let loose for Serthica’s Unwinding — our event spanning 24 September-15 October that doubles as a test drive.

This round’s test drive participants do not require an invite to apply. Applications open over 8-14 October. Enjoy!

THE UNWINDING

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TEST DRIVE TOURISTS | OLD TIMERS | DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
SPILL THE TEA | DRIP BY DRIP | ALL A DREA —

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✘ NEWCOMERS | BARRELING IN

Soaring seagulls and splintered silence. You awaken on the shoreline of steampunk citadel Clockwork Serthica, recovered by the irritable witch Karsa.

She shares translation and communication devices, scarce healing and a rapid briefing: you have reached a world where undead forces seek to weaponise you in their battle for dominion. Karsa’s employer, the Merchant leads travel to beacons meant to return you home.

Other otherworlders have already infiltrated Serthica. Karsa steers newcomers into the impoverished underworld of the Mouse House, to board a rickety coal train serving the citadel.

■ Silver tongues can win you passage.

■ ...alternatively, hide in the obscenely large whiskey barrels the train also smuggles in.

■ Mid-voyage, the train quakes, slamming you into walls and windows. Around you, the stench of bleach, the warm crackle of embers and static magic that builds thick, nearly electric.

You feel faint and fainter, when you overhear Karsa’s murmured, “It’s too early” — “find” — “find” — “it’s like a drea” — “don’t unwind” — “all child’s play.”

And then you’re U n w i n d i n g.

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✘ OLD TIMERS | INHALE-EXHALE

Eidris, Minaras, the Neutral Zone: all abuzz with residential whispers of imminent Unwinding — an annual fixture natives dread without fully remembering.

■ In the two days leading to the Unwinding, characters struggle to tell apart or remember the physical features of natives.

■ Some locals steal you into dark alleys, where they become suddenly stiff, emitting a rusty, guttural Ke-ke-ke sound. They do not recall this after.

The Unwinding kicks off at 6am, when both Eidris and Minaras are overground. Jim Kirk’s fixed music box begins to play, its chipper rural tune overtaking your thoughts: “Up the mountain, in the grove, hand in hand to Ke-ke-ke — Ke-Waihu, fresh harvest’s a treasure trove, each fall we feast anew.”

Earth shatters seismically underfoot, magic depletes, the citadel’s clock tower strikes 6:00 — and an urgent communication from the Merchant is interrupted by static, “You can we-we-we-…-stand it, the white man come — remembrrrrrrrrrrrr live, you are alive, do not be convinsssss —ssss — ssssd otherwisssssss —”

But you’re already U n w i n d i n g.

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✘ DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Down and down, you tumble, Alice — through a cavernous tunnel that widens and chokes arbitrarily. Sometimes you float and fly, sometimes you’re thrust sideways. Mostly, you keep falling.

■ Beware objects falling into you: from grand pianos to mystical balls of fire, stray beds, love letters and sharp-pointed weapons. Even a blood-spattered umbrella that shields against anything.

■ You’re dropped unceremoniously into an underground lair, as items keep falling down. Unclaimed, they disappear within minutes. Three jackalopes smoking opiate pipes point you indifferently towards a locked door. On its handle sit a bone dice and a note instructing, ROLL FOUR TO OPEN.

■ The dice can only be thrown every 10 minutes and feels too monstrously heavy to lift otherwise. Each roll makes the effect of the previous throw disappear. If you get:

one: gravity fades, the dice floats out of reach. ( The jackalopes enjoy the breeze. )

two: the floor, barring a few narrow steps at great jumping distance, is lava. ( The jackalopes check ‘hell’ off their vacation list.)

three: an irked dragon coils beside you. (The jackalopes prepare to tan.)

five: the thrower grows and grows and grows, until they must contort creatively to fit inside. ( The jackalopes charge rent. )

six: the room fills with water that nearly reaches the ceiling. (The jackalopes are competitive swimmers.)

seven: everything about your companion irritates you. They even breathe wrong. ( The jackalopes find this awkward. )

eight: The floor slowly expands into quicksand. ( The jackalopes hoverboard. )

■ Roll four and the door creaks merrily open. A second note slips loose, I’m sorry. Head in, your newfound possessions abandoned — and keep U n w i n d i n g.

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✘ SPILL THE TEA

You wake, dressed to the steampunk nines, at a tea party, alongside a companion and a slew of eerie guests: cog droids, faceless people and animated human-sized burlap mannequins. You only hear static and white noise when they speak.

When you leave the table, a fox butler passes you the empty kettle, asking you to, ”Make tea and finish here”.

■ You’re inevitably stuck in a decrepit dollhouse. Heavily boarded doors and windows ultimately open to show plague sickness in the streets. The fox butler closes them, reminding, ”He’ll make it go away.”

■ Travel a corridor of repeating rooms to reach the kitchens, and don’t dally. Every time the clock strikes a new hour, the partygoers grab their sharpest knife and stalk down the house to pursue you. The frenzy lasts 10 minutes before they return to their seats — barricade in deserted rooms, hide behind curtains or climb up the chimney…

■ For tea, the mannequin cook directs you to retrieve juniper and rosemary leaves from the greenhouse, where plant tendrils try to trap you, leaving marks of mould; rescue the milk container from a cat that’s running on the crumbling staircase, and sugar from a dish in the lavish nursery room, where ghostly hands might seek to drag you into walls and send you back down the rabbit hole.

■ Supplied, the huffing burlap cook prepares tea. Just as you’re about to taste the black brew at the party table, a man in white takes and spills your tea out in a plant pot. You only hear, ”You don’t need this yet” — before you’re U n w i n d i ng.

■ On exiting the Unwinding, your pockets burst with plants or leaves of juniper and rosemary. They can alleviate McCoy’s sickness.

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✘ DRIP BY DRIP

You wake up in bloodied clothes in a filled bathtub. You are hounded by urgency, as if you’re hunted. The unease never wanes, as you gather your bearings and join the bustling city streets, armed with a blood-spattered white umbrella. In your pocket, two paper notes: CHILDREN LIE and WHAT IS HIS NAME?(

Your memories are confused: half of you is certain you are a content citizen of Serthica. The other riots that you don’t belong. An excruciating migraine strikes when you try to remember how you arrived here.

Gravity’s a loose concept: you walk, or you float. The city is either perfectly still, or inundated with the screeching of hearses and criers. Locals — all faceless, or man-sized burlap mannequins — mill busily, despite the forlorn rain.

■ Hold on to your umbrella: linger uncovered in the rain, and your facial features slowly fade, while you desperately try to convince your teammate that you should stay here forever. You recover once dry.

■ The inhuman locals grow increasingly more hostile with time: carriages want to run you over, friendly burlap shopkeepers push you into a ditch. They chase if you ask their name.

■ Happily, this world is vulnerable to your desires: wish gravity undone, and you can walk on walls. Think a river into being, and it bursts ahead. Imagine buildings, and they pop up. Playing God comes at a price of bad luck: the staircase you envisage thins and breaks just as you cross it, your knife rusts after the first swing.

■ Your pursuers abandon you, when you reach a deserted marketplace and encounter a drenched, battered boy wearing a fox mask. He is playing with paper boats in the middle of a large black puddle. You feel deep and building hatred for him.

■ Seeing you, the child mentions one of you previously tried to kill him. He offers his name, in exchange for your umbrella:

a. Refuse or dally, and dark hands rise out of the puddle to pull you and your partner in, scratching you bloody. The last thing you see, before you wake up in the bathtub again (or out of the Unwinding), is a man in white who collects your umbrella. He holds it over the child, scolding, ”Did you forget again? This one never hurt you.”

b. To surrender the umbrella, step on the paper boats as you cross the puddle to the boy. Walking straight on water feels like stepping on knives. The child accepts your umbrella, whispering his name is ”Hyang-Won”, before you start to fade out of the Unwinding.

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✘ IT WAS ALL A DREA —

New or old, as the Unwinding ends, you wake up in Ma’am Mariol’s modest orphanage in the Mouse House. Mariol, the orphans and Serthica at large recall nothing about the Unwinding. Karsa, who dragged you in, is pale and exhausted, her memory patchy. She urges everyone to recuperate before heading back overground.

■ Your body shows only a fraction of any damage sustained in the Unwinding.

■ Ma’am Mariol’s labyrinthine home offers limited accommodations: share beds, floors, and household chores, while the orphans led by curious Gavroche, peer in.

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NOTES

■ You can make network posts outside of the Unwinding.

■ Feel free to mark if you're a test drive tourist or an old timer in your top level!

■ The Unwinding is a shifting of realities not a dreamscape.

■ You can opt out of the Unwinding by keeping characters in the Mouse House. Here, nothing seems amiss.

■ QUESTIONS!

Comments

[jeoha]

I am not sure time means the same thing to the two of us, Master Lan.

[ He crouches down, watching the jackalope wearily, but it seems even these creatures calm under the man's gentle touch.

But his flickering memories remind him just how capable Lan Wangi is with the sword he wields. The gentleness is not an enduring trait, but a fleeting one. ]

I forgot even your name until I saw your face. I swear a day ago - no more - I was home once more. [ Or as close to home as the wilds of the north counted. ]

At least my arrival was well timed. Where are we?

[downswing]

( He... lingers, splayed like a child, an elder, a cripple. Should raise himself. Bereft of manners, he may only gaze at Lee Chang, then the barren ground beside him, and anticipate the man's crouch will soon dissolve in a more righteously forgiving sprawl. )

Unknown. ( No, the correction, after: ) I suspected... a dreaming.

( Yet he raises his crushed arm, where blood yet gathers, the wound restitches. Where his own mind would not presume to wish his flesh undone. )

You were long fled.

( 'Gone,' he refuses. 'Relinquished.' 'Lost.' A man does not rue friendships, does not mourn friends. Only despairs silently each day when he crosses a land in hopes of spotting their steps, of rekindling their kinship.

He did not anticipate the quiet, calm ache of this, like a bruise, like breathing. Grief is a learned thing, an intoxication. Perhaps sixteen years of it inured him. And yet he allows himself now to feel. )

[jeoha]

[ He grimaces, but when Wangji makes no move to raise himself from the floor, eventually he sits - one knee propped before him and the other folding beneath him, looking around warily. ]

I do not remember fleeing. [ Not from this, at least. Not from them. ]

Nor my return. It is all as if a distant memory I long forgot, slowly being dragged to the surface. So I do not think this is a dream. Dreams lack memories, they do not build them.

[ A pause, a glance at the shattered piano, and then the shadow of a smirk. ]

And in my dreams I am not disturbed or set back by any weight or difficulty, if I do not wish it.

[downswing]

( A fine thing, to be graciously humoured. He does not bend or break himself to offer thanks, does not lift himself past the modest increments his wounds allow him.

Qi circulates like hard storming, like warmth under fingertips, like spring in bloom. He feels it active, stokes it, stings when healing accelerates past its natural progress. He is not ready. The energy of his own flesh is inflicted upon him.

So be it, named done. )

Lee Chang is blessed beneath the heavens. ( Easy, pretty, long feathers of the same bird in lethargic flight: their humour is matched, kind of a kind. Paltry. )
Even his dreams heed his command.

( Truly, Wangji has made the acquaintance of a foremost son of heavens. Only, the smile teases to poison the corner of his mouth, how blessed can Lee Chang be, if he has arrived here, beside Wangji once more? )

You appear in health. ( And is he? )

[jeoha]

[ Lee Chan let out a huff of a laugh, closing his eyes. Blessed beneath the heavens, indeed. A son of the heavens, self sacrificed to save the earth. He pushed the idea away.]

The heavens chose to make the nightmares real rather than keep them to dreams.

But I am whole, as you see me.

[ He paused for a long moment, glancing up the impossibly long tunnel they had tumbled down. ]

… How long has it been, since we last shared a moment?

[downswing]

( And did they share moments, trickled between fingertips? He intends to laugh, to call out the presumption — to assume closeness when each man keeps his own counsel, when Wangji was likely better known by the instrument that branded his arm.

They are guarded, from each other, from their own thoughts. Worries have littered Lee Chang's face deeper than wrinkles, for the better part of every day when he has been known to Lan Wangji. Worries, then brother's calm, a learned ease of glossed sophistication. Artifice. Game. )

Months. Perhaps the better swell of a year.

( Confused, chaotic. His hand trails dirt for a rapid succession of heartbeats, before his fingers clasp, before he finds purchase and lifts himself on his elbows. )

Apologies. Time does not walk a friend here.

[jeoha]

[ Somehow, he isn’t surprised by that answer. He places it against his own thoughts - his own memories - and attempts to use it as a measurement as if he could trace out how the missing pieces fit together. But of course they don’t. They couldn’t. He was no physicist - had never listened when the others has rambled about parallel dimensions or time space continuum - had never thought it mattered. And indeed, it didn’t matter now. He could not make his recollection of time line up with his memories, or even with the current moment.

He was not hung up on the impossible. A theoretical impossibility had no place in the assessment when faced with the brutal facts of reality: Either this was real, or it was not. Everything told him - despite himself - that it was real. He was living it, as if it was real.

So it was. ]

… It seems time is no friend of mine, either.

It feels both a moment and a lifetime since I have last seen you.

… But you have my deepest apologies. I would not abandon you or our fellows so easily or for so long by choice.

[ He finally pulls his eyes away from the tunnel and back to Wangji, now half sitting up. Good. ]

Which means I cannot promise my continued presence, until I know what caused my absence.

What I can promise is to do everything in my power to help you until we part - intentionally or otherwise.

[downswing]

( Pretty words. And then the truth, as Lee Chang himself affords it: they cannot vow to never splinter paths, like lovers of old, like stars from constellations. Only the Heavens decide their course, and when have they spared Lan Wangji of tragedy?

He drifts up, swaying like a willow tree. Finding his footing, before gently setting the unharmed hand on the nearest wall. Balance. Each step at its time. )

I am no maiden, requiring rescue or pledge of matrimony.

( But he does not refute, does not refuse. Merely nods, head soft and cascading where it drips from his pins, and he accepts the gift of easy companionship. )

Who are you, since last we crossed paths?

( A man changed. Perhaps for the better. Little doubt, for the worse. Time seldom improves men, only children. And they have long abandoned the innocence of their timid years, juvenile. )

[jeoha]

[ His lips twitch with a hint of amusement at the idea of Lan Wangji as a maiden - even if his etheral beauty could lend to that assumption. ]

A wanderer, I suppose. A man in search of truth.

[ No longer a prince, no longer even a living man. A ghost, following the trails of a deadly plague. ]

And yet I am brought here once more, where my search misleads and meanders in impossible directions. At least now I know the task will wait.

[ He stands as Wangji does, watching him closely but not offering any more help. He would not want to offend. ]

And you? Has time and tide swayed your purpose, or do you still seek the means home?

[downswing]

( Lee Chang's search misled. His task, waiting. Not for the first time, Lan Wangji — yet slow in his step, measured for how it perpetually stirs and unsettles his wounding — understands his privilege: he came from a time, a place when the waters of his personal and clan grievances had largely calmed.

Recovery awaits him at home, sooner than crisis. And the aching, dull certainty that the man who wears his brother's weight of command and his guan could yet benefit from support. )

I do not stray.

( Steadfast, loyal, hard as river stone. Unyielding. And he knows the poisoned truth of it: that which does not bend must irrevocably break. Lan Wangji is forge steel, soon molten. )

I remain a father to one. ( Truth, as they had left it. ) Husband to another. ( A development, of sorts. ) Honoured protector of the dead and the living, when they cross paths in battle.